Time’s Up
Fuck it. Fuck this. It’s not worth it.
This is embarrassing to admit, but those are the words that run through my mind when I’m challenging myself with something new. Call it part of the learning process.
I push tangled hair back over one ear and look up from the first page of my crisp, unbroken notebook. Everyone else is heads down in thought.
I’m not a phoenix rising from the ashes. The phoenix rises to become itself once again. There is no fucking way I’m being reborn to become who I was already.
The banquet hall is large and narrow with beige undertones. Solid oak doors hold in sweaty vibes of change in progress.
Rows of multipurpose chairs neatly glued together. Room service mugs filled with lukewarm liquid. Beige-related carpet of a structurally busy pattern, designed to get butts from the aisles into seats.
The seats in this particular room are filled by entrepreneurs. Future leaders with big dreams and large aspirations. Everyone in this room, except for me.
I look around. Towards the back of the space, oversized windows overlook the famous suspension bridge. The bridge was built by many men over many years before it was painted a color called international orange.
I’m a dreamer. Also a fraud and renegade, misfit and misanthrope, no real talent except for the ability to dream real big.
Am I the only one here who feels that way?
I hear Andy sniffling next to me, the stiff dryness of an overly air-conditioned room at nine in the morning. I zip my favorite gray hoodie all the way to the top and pull the strings in a little tighter. Shrugging my body into the soft cotton, hesitant fists stuffing deeper into threadbare pockets.
The hoodie reads Yoga Vida on the back, a place that saved this particular butt during some rough months in New York City last year. Over the course of this weekend in Sausalito, seemingly suspended in time, people will oddly enough assume that the studio is mine.
Andy and I met just a moment ago. He turned to me with a warm smile and introduced himself by speaking in short, concise sentences. He was friendly and down to earth, a Harvard M.B.A. originally from the midwest. He works in Boston at a healthcare startup.
“Time is up,” they say. We stop writing and turn to face each other.
First, I read the question aloud.
What would I be doing if I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, had no fear, and stopped coming up with excuses?
Then I read my answer. To not bore you, dear reader, the synopsis is this:
I’d write nonstop. I’d write one book, then a second, then the third. I’d start a digital newspaper, or radio station, or combination of the two. I’d open a recording studio. I’d go back to Cleveland, where I grew up, and open a cool place for teenagers to hang out — in the way I was saved from getting into trouble back when I was that age. I’d travel the world. For chunks at a time, I’d choose to be deliberately homeless.
Thirty seconds are up. His turn.
He’d open a summer camp for underprivileged kids. He’d reinvent the way we practice medicine. He pauses. He’d accelerate cancer research.
It won’t be until tomorrow that I’d notice the long and deliberate scar running alongside the side of his scalp.
A significant piece inside of me sinks as my entire physical body lifts from the seat of the rigid chair.
The U.S. healthcare system makes me furious. How do we incorporate responsibility while attempting to solve some of humanity’s greatest problems?
Pretty girls aren’t supposed to be pissed.
Next question.
The session leader describes a situation in which your future grandchild asks what you did with your life.
We’re to write down the name of said future grandchild. I slouch back down.
I’m thirty five. How do I know I’ll live to see grandchildren? Will I have children too late in life, or not have any at all because I’m still tethered to some distant plan?
The part that gets me the most — I’m not sure that I’ll chase the family thing until some sort of societal value-add has been sorted first.
I feel Andy’s presence. He’s sitting up straighter, surreptitiously glancing over my shoulder. I write “this is stupid” and quietly creep out the side entrance where I cry in the bathroom for the next ten minutes, later blaming it on the gluten I ate at breakfast.
All of us question our purpose, thought bubbles of delicate dreams bouncing along the surface of a deep, dark ocean. Sometimes, the best we can do is motor gently through the waves of a humdrum status quo. There’s gotta be a better way…a way to break free from that.
If I can write down my intentions, get out of my seat, maybe even tip this chair over in the process…perhaps that’s the beginning.
We all need a place to start.
Here’s what I went back and wrote:
I’m not sure that I’ll have a granddaughter to tell any story to. But if I do, I’ll tell her that I was privileged enough to live in some great cities and work with some incredibly creative people. I provided those around me with a bit of inspiration to help them create their own impact in the world. I was able to support the projects I believed in. I took care of myself. Also, I wrote my ass off.
To tell you the truth, writing those words calmed me down, as writing tends to do. I couldn’t go out and immediately solve the larger, more complex problems that moved me the most, but I could start by utilizing the tools and strengths available to me now and share that energy with everyone I encountered along the way.
I continue to generate tactical next steps. Which is ridiculously challenging when there’s so much real-world motoring required to stay afloat.
The game-changer, the real news and perhaps the point of this story, is that a small step exists that correlates directly to a giant leap.
It lies in the realization that we can, in fact, do whatever it is that we set our minds out to do. We simply need to begin by asking ourselves these difficult questions.
For me, perhaps it’s building in a physical place with tools strictly digital. Putting a pen to infinitely scrolling paper, grateful for the fact that she is indeed wildly alive.
Originally posted in http://losangelestonewyork.tumblr.com/
More about the author: http://nicolecifani.com
